VVC is on the horizon, and AV1 has essentially become mainstream - HEVC is simply no longer needed by anyone.

HEVC/AV1 support is still spotty, and AV1 encoding is still expensive. Though I agree that HEVC is a dead end.

This is very outdated information. AV1 encoding with SVT-AV1, which is a high performance encoder written by Netflix and Intel, works faster than x265 (and other h.265 encoders), and is much closer to x264 IIRC. With lower quality presets it worked at 3-4× on my old Haswell i5. On higher ones that still make sense by their own recommendations, the speed was around 1×. That CPU is over 10 years old.

https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1

Encoding video on CPU is a no-go, AV1 is only supported on Alchemist IIRC. Certainly no hardware I possess has accelerated AV1 encode. I can do HEVC at 8x, SVT-AV1 manages 0.5x for the same file. There's just no comparison.

On which preset for SVT-AV1? One of the strengths of SVT-AV1 is the presets offer a very wide trade off between quality and complexity. See the chart here:

https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/21/video-engineering/av1-...

If you try a preset like 8 you may find you get good enough quality and a fast enough encode at a good enough bitrate. Some encoding guides:

https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1

You'll have to play around with the parameters to get the results you want. Try 5 minute clips until you're happy with it.

And use SVT-AV1 2.2 since that has more performance improvements:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-2.2-Released

Even using -preset 12 and it's still 8x slower than hevc_nvenc. Encoding on CPU just isn't viable, not to mention the enormous perf impact on everything else running on my computer vs next to no perf impact when I use nvenc.

It's always going to be slower than a hardware encoder.

I have an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop which has hardware AV1 encoding. If I use preset 8 with SVT-AV1 on a 1080p encode I get 30 frames per second:

ffmpeg.exe -i "input.mp4" -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -crf 40 -preset 8 -g 240 -svtav1-params tune=0 -c:a libopus -b:a 128k av1.mp4

With preset 12 I get 143 fps. With preset 10 I get 84 fps.

If I use the hardware encoder I get anywhere from 15 fps to 589 fps depending on the settings I use. I get 103 fps with this:

ffmpeg.exe -i "input.mp4" -c:v av1_amf -pix_fmt yuv420p -quality high_quality -preencode true -b:v 4M -c:a libopus -b:a 128k av1.mp4

Hardware encoder parameters: https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/AMF/wiki/AMF%20E...

You can get any encoder to be extremely fast if you don't care about quality and turn off all the tools.

Generally speaking x265 was never know to be fast. Even Netflix moved their HEVC encoder away from x265.

And My question is where is AV2?

If you are doing CPU encodes, SVT-AV1 M12 is faster than x264 veryfast and produces higher quality output than x264 veryslow.

How bad is the encoding gap between AV1 and HEVC for equivalent qualities these days?

AV1 is already faster and has been for around three years — if you're not using the reference encoder, which is dog slow, and that will probably not change. Have a gander at SVT-AV1.

SVT-AV1 can achieve better quality for the same encode time as x265 at every point of the encoding curve. Alternatively SVT-AV1 can achieve the same quality for better encoding time:

https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/21/video-engineering/av1-...

So the graph suggest SVT-AV1 offer higher quality encode than LibAOM?

HEVC is from the VP9 generation of codecs. AV1 is 30% more efficient for HD encodes, and the gap increases for higher resolutions and color depths.

Intel is out of money and in damage control mode.

Unfortunately, this was a great project but just like Optane memory its being shelved due to cost mitigation measures.